The program will begin enrolling students for the PhD in Leadership and Change program for Healthcare, with its first cohort starting in July 2015. With the same unique low-residency model, students can still live and work anywhere, coming together for three face-to-face residencies a year.

The new concentration offers an opportunity for those in leadership roles in a variety of healthcare organizations and a range of healthcare professions to engage in meaningful study and applied research that impacts and improves their practice. Aligned with Antioch University’s mission to further social, economic, and environmental justice, and consistent with the program’s decade-long success in educating scholar-practitioners, students in the healthcare concentration will address topics such as relationship-centered care, community access, education and advocacy, socially responsible and ethical decision making, and leadership for navigating ongoing changes in healthcare environments.

“Healthcare systems in the U.S. and globally are in the midst of cataclysmic changes. Current approaches to financing, delivery, service, and organization are facing innumerable challenges,” said Dr. Laurien Alexandre, director of the PhDLC. “Many healthcare professionals are daunted by the tasks ahead while millions face the stark reality of lack of access and/or insufficient care. Based on these challenges, the PhDLC recognizes the importance of bringing our socially engaged mission, distinctive pedagogy, and unique delivery to those that are leading change within the rapidly evolving healthcare field.”

Healthcare leaders will be able to choose which of the program’s two pathways better suits both their style as a learner and their interest as a practitioner.

“Students in the healthcare concentration will immerse themselves in the program’s interdisciplinary focus on the research and practice of leading change and apply it to the healthcare field within the context of a cohort learning community of other healthcare leaders,” Alexandre said.

• Highlight the theory, research, and practice of leading change rather than the management of human and financial resources that is prevalent within traditional doctorates in healthcare administration.

• Offer an integrated curriculum in which learners move seamlessly between face-to-face and virtual activities and between peer team-based learning and individualized self-paced progress.

• Emphasize research approaches that are both traditionally accepted and those that are challenging to the field as “evidence-based” is grounded in both quantitative and qualitative ways of knowing.

• Focus on the expertise of students and integrate their professional experiences into the ongoing curriculum.

• Hold an international residency to examine and learn from healthcare delivery systems in other countries.

• Engage learners with an experienced team of senior-level full-time leadership and change professors coupled with field-based affiliate faculty from the healthcare sector.